Analyzing Marketing Campaigns with Advanced Metrics: Single and Multi-Touch Attribution

When measuring the success of your marketing campaign, apply advanced metrics — such as single attribution and multi-touch attribution — to show how your lead-generation efforts contribute to revenue. Doing so helps ensure that marketing is considered a viable part of the revenue team and a solid contributor to the company's bottom line.

Single-attribution measurements help you give credit for a deal to marketing programs that originally created or that closed the deal, known as first-touch (FT) and last-touch (LT) attribution. Because many of your lead-generation programs are TOFU (top-of-funnel), you will have a lot of FT attribution in your measurements.

Multi-touch (MT) attribution tracks how each marketing program touches a deal throughout the lead lifecycle. It essentially spreads the value of the deal over all marketing interactions with the lead to see how your programs work together to create opportunities and drive closed/won deals.

Many marketers don't track MT attribution, so they don't get credit for how they influenced a deal over time. But because marketing is multichanneled and today's buyer self-educates, marketing most likely touches a deal many times before that deal is closed.

By using FT, LT, and MT attribution in your marketing automation tool, you can pinpoint marketing's influence granularly instead of relying on sales to mark something in their CRM tool that indicates marketing has found a lead.